dietsch

Ashcroft still targets porn

The Baltimore Sun reports on the Justice Department's latest crusade against pornography. This will make for an interesting war. Many of the largest media companies in the United States distribute and market pornography via cable outlets. Those companies have deep pockets and many ties to the Bush Administration, to Congress, and to the political parties. However, aside from the bedfellowing and the usual moral indignation (Get out of my bedroom, consenting adults, etc.), I learned something interesting while I was looking up other stories about this online. This Boston Phoenix article has a disturbing quote:

But perhaps the most important thing about Ass Clowns 3 is this: it could land its distributors, Robert Zicari (a/k/a Rob Black) and his fiancée, Janet Romano (a/k/a Lizzie Borden), in prison for the next 50 years.

As Zicari observed in an interview last week with ABC News’s Nightline, that’s double the amount of prison time faced by Hemant Lakhani, the British national who was recently charged with trying to sell a surface-to-air missile to government agents posing as terrorists seeking to shoot down a commercial airliner. Thank you, John Ashcroft. I'm glad it's more important to protect adults from sexual images than it is to defend against terrorists. [via Politech, Boing Boing, MeFi, and nearly everywhere else on the Web]